Hyacinth
by sea-salt kisses
Summary: I know now that there will be other chances, times ahead for us where we can get it right. I won't remember you when I meet you again, but I know that I'll love you. I've always loved you. I'll remember you in the summertime. — Axel, Roxas, Sora. Southern Next Life AU.


**hyacinth**

" _I__ dream about magnolias in June __  
__And I'm wishin that I was there __  
__Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans __  
__When that's where you left your heart __  
__And there's one thing more, I miss the one I care for __  
__More than I miss New Orleans_ "

**. . .**

Sora grows taller in time with the seasons, sprouts from three feet to four feet to five and a half. Sweltering evenings find him lounging out on some neighbour's manicured lawn, arms splayed and knees crossed, watching the clouds waltz by.

His favourite season is the spring – New Orleans in springtime throbs with life. He anticipates the changing of the leaf colours, from orange to brown to dark waxy green. There's an aura down the parkways like ghosts press thumbprints into the air. Every breath is filled with the laughter of lives past, secrets whispered over mimosas and fondue, the screaming of husbands and wives. He walks the miles into the city as often as he can get away, leaving the suburb he lives in to watch people dance in the streets; shrimp poboys and gumbo so spicy it makes his tongue sing. The ladies at the sandwich stand on Rue Sloan slip him food on the sly — they hate minimum wage as much as they hate the way Sora's ribs stick out.

His own town is small, the kind where the homecoming queen fucks the quarterback and everyone knows within minutes. He hasn't made a post on his Facebook in two years – just sits back and watches the drama unfold. It slides from him like lobster butter, because all he really cares about is that Riku wins swim regionals and Kairi doesn't sprain her ankle at dance practice. He takes little notice of who's a _whore_, who's on _coke_, who's a _faggot_; just files the rumours in the back of his mind, a Mason jar filled to the brim with all the malignancy a small Southern town can give.

Somehow, he manages to avoid assholes like Tidus and Wakka, who slammed Zexion into the lockers so hard last year they gave him an aneurism. He imagines it has something to do with the fact that his best friend is six feet tall, with muscles carved and dangerous. Still, sometimes his teachers pull him aside when he ambles into class first thing in the morning. They aren't naïve like Kairi and Riku, but neither is he. Sora's long since learned how to lie, through white teeth and pink lips and eyes so big and blue. The truth is eclipsed behind dilated pupils. His hands gesture to his bruises like he's advertising them for auction. _Oh, these? Me and Riku had a little too much fun at the skatepark, Ms. Gainsborough. No biggie._

They all swallow his stories. Easy, not like what he has to swallow when he pulls empty words from the fabric of thin air. Sora doesn't like to lie. It stings the back of his throat like cough syrup laced with arsenic, smarts even harder at the sight of Ms. Gainsborough baring her teeth with a smile hung from tinsel strings. His father lies; his mother lies. The idea of growing up to be like them makes the bile rise, so he slouches his shoulders when he walks, puts hands in his pockets, grinning like the stoners when they get back from hotboxing after lunch. He doesn't hold himself up ramrod straight, like his daddy looks in the mornings, buttoning his work shirt in the mirror. He has his mother's eyes, her hair, and her smile, but not her self-depricating tendencies, so Sora can face his own reflection without too much of a cringe.

He doesn't dwell on his biceps and wrists. It's alright, he thinks, the smattering of yellowing bruises, angry red stripes coating his forearms. He makes a valiant effort to find as much time to spend away from home as possible, and sometimes, he hides a few bottles of daddy's Heaven Hill deep in the bowels of his closet. It's easier when daddy doesn't drink. When daddy doesn't drink, he lays his head down and cries, until mama places butterfly fingertips against his broad, heaving shoulders. But fate is cruel, and Sora can't always beat daddy home. Most nights daddy stomps in from the factory with smokes, cold pizza, and a few crinkled twenties to throw at Sora's cowering mama. Give it an hour or two and the old man's out cold, comatose on the recliner.

But Sora is resilient; Sora is strong. Sora isn't like them. He's smart in the way that most people don't notice beneath his facades of charm. He's quietly thoughtful and curious – observant. He notices the way his mother's teeth have begun to rot. He notices the way his father's hands cup around a phantom beer bottle, even when he's just standing straight. He notices the way Kairi's breath hitches when he touches her neck to whisper her a story. Sora isn't stupid, no matter what his father calls him.

He's smart enough to sell himself out in ways he knows will get him what he wants, whether that's an extra cookie in Sunday school or his dick sucked at a football game. He knows that when he asks just so, with his lips pursed around an imaginary candy, Riku will offer him the old blow up mattress in his living room. When his laughter chimes forth, warm and sweet like a summer breeze, there's Kairi, who means more to him than he would ever care to admit, whose fingers through his hair card comfort and security. And of course, there's Kairi's mother, who worries over him from the moment he passes the threshold, and attempts to feed him extra portions.

Sora fights the jagged beast in his stomach that rears its head at the mention of food – real, homemade food, not like the box stuff his mama makes, or the stale pizza his father hides in the rear cabinets. Until –

Sora notices things. He notices his mother locking herself in the bathroom and shoving fingers down her throat. He notices her naked in the living room mirror, fingers grappling for imaginary fat, grazing her ribs that protrude much farther than his, sick and boney like a bird's sternum. He notices that she doesn't have a Riku or a Kairi. He notices this with a twinge of something in his throat more painful than the thing twisting in his stomach.

It's becoming easier to ignore the serrated burning in his stomach when he thinks about food, and he shakes his head politely at the offer of seconds. He doesn't tell Kairi's mama that hers is the only food he's eaten all weekend, and he doesn't miss the look of frustration Kairi sends his way. After all, when he walks home, he (_and_ _she_) know the kitchen will be empty. He smiles her way, squeezes her hand under the table in a gesture that's more symbolic than comforting. After all, maybe he can scrounge up a few overripe tomatoes to make a sandwich with.

His mama's working the late shift at the Main Street diner tonight, and with a little wishing and a lot of luck, his father is passed out on the recliner, instead of slamming doors shut, or – _please, no, oh please god no –_

Open.

* * *

When they reach senior year, Kairi finally asks Sora why he always smiles. He's long learned to cover the bruises with foundation (the kind that gets him laughed at by the cashiers at Winn Dixie) and the bones yanked out of socket heal on their own. Sora doesn't say that it gets lonely sometimes, when Riku has a swim meet in Baton Rouge, or Kairi has a piano recital. He doesn't say that those are the nights he avoids going home until the sun sinks low, comes in later than he should with school at eight the next morning. He doesn't tell Kairi how he tiptoes over the threshold, foot moving from board to board, a special pattern ingrained in his memory – he's careful to avoid the ones that squeak. He doesn't tell her how tries not to wake his father, or that he sneaks into the kitchen. He scrounges up bread, slices of yellow cheese if he's lucky, and consumes them fervidly.

Once that's done, he goes upstairs, turns on the faucet and drinks until the fullness makes his body ache with a throbbing pressure; until he forgets how ravenous he is.

It's late at night when he opens his window and he looks outside. He doesn't tell Kairi that once, when he was high off some strain of rare kush only a lush like Riku could afford, he sees the old man from next door, bent over his flower bed and pulling weeds. He's never outside in the day time, at least not when Sora's around; Sora had half assumed it was for sale by owner, with a sign somewhere glaring an overvalued price offer. He's surprised the person who tends such beautiful flowers is such a towering monster of a man, ancient and grizzled but still the kinda guy you avoid in dark alleyways. His muscles ripple beneath the tight white of his wife beater, head enshrouded in a veil. It takes Sora's sky high mind a moment to fire the synapses that inform him the old man is smoking. He's half convinced the old man is insane, tending a garden at half past two in the morning.

The thought is so outrageous that he laughs, laughs hard and loud with abandon; he hears the creak of the recliner before his mind sobers together. Before he remembers where he is. He starts to pray, not because he believes in god, but because he doesn't know what else to do. He chants the lord's prayer until his father comes tearing upstairs with a bottle in his hand, and a horrible, clumsy thumping up the steps.

* * *

Sora doesn't ask the old man his name. Instead, he waits for him to drive off Sunday morning – not to go to church, but to pick up the local Sunday paper they quit delivering. Something about budget cuts, but Sora expects it's so the Struggle team could build afford to rent out practice matches in New Orleans's brand new million dollar arena.

The old man's name is Axel, he learns from his mail. From looking in the window, he sees the man has two cats. From the work shirt he finds hung over the back porch railing, he finds out that Axel smells of bar soap and cherry cigarillos. His trash can professes his love of Oreos and ramen noodles, and from the lack of half-and-half or Splenda packets, that he drinks his coffee black.

He notices the old man as often as he can manage. Most of the time, it's after he's gotten high with Riku, so he watches Axel with a focus that puts his normal level of attentiveness to shame.

The old man toils around his Eden with the sort of tenderness reserved for a lover. His fingers, gnarled and faintly freckled, Sora imagines, graze over the soft golden petals of his flowers, bruised with spots of the brightest blue. His movements are practiced as he yanks the occasional kudzo or snatch of clover. Sora doesn't know what kind of flowers they are, only that the man keeps them in a long, rectangular enclosure of brick. It encircles the entirety of his rickety front porch and peters off toward the back fence.

Axe's garden is immaculate, and there are never weeds. The man avoids the use of pesticides and fertilizers, but still the garden thrives with an ethereal vivacity. When the clouds turn grey and their bottoms fall out, the petals gleam blue like lapis lazuli against rolling planes of yellow.

Sora never speaks a word to Axel, and Axel never looks up from his flowerbed. He simply watches the elder roam the garden from his windowsill, as the wafting smoke from his joint filters out through the blinds.

With pupils gaping, he wonders idly why the old man never hires help to keep the rows and rows of flowers in check. His fingers curl around one another with the onset of some horrible disease, and Sora knows without a doubt that it can't be good for his joints to bend over the bricks of the enclosure like that. Still, he's high, higher than a jet plane, and it never occurs to him to offer any assistance, or to make his presence known to the old man. He wonders what it would feel like, saying his name out loud for the first time. Axel – the first harsh syllable followed by a touch of tongue to teeth. But what's in a name, after all, and Sora knows little to nothing about the man – nothing but his love and affection for those flowers.

He _does_ know from Riku's little brother that Axel throws every last flyer left by hopeful neighborhood kids away. Sora drawls long and hard on his jay, watches the ember gleaming red against the blackening horizon. He wonders vaguely if Axel can distinguish the smell of pot in the summer air. He wonders what kind of man Axel is, really – wonders if he's harsh like his name, or soft like the way his hands touch those flowers. The old man is ridiculous, if anything. His hair is a shade of red that defies gravity and his age, its surface tinted with occasional pale strands of white and grey. His hands are like the roots of ancient trees, though there are none in his yard. Nothing to obscure the steady stream of light to his flowers.

Sora draws on his jay, and Sora notices another thing – when the old man walks in the flowers, he never wears shoes. He also notices that when Axel takes his gloves off – a rare thing, but a must when he handles the delicate petals – his fingers are coated in amorphous skin and blackened flesh. It takes Sora hours in the school library, thumbing through photos in his health textbook of skin diseases and malignancies, to learn that they're burn scars.

* * *

It's out of the blue that his father tells him the old man's story. Given, Sora's known bits and pieces from the very beginning, but given the source, he wasn't sure he trusted most of what he heard. Sometimes, the kids at school whispered about him in the quiet hours between classes. If Sora regrets anything about high school, it's not paying any attention in home room four years in a row. If he had, he might have known that Axel existed if, from nothing else, from the names his classmates called him.

_Fairy. Shriveled up old faggot_.

His father is sitting at the table one day cutting coupons from the newspaper when he brings up Axel at all. Rare, passing conversation – that maybe, if Sora wants to make some money, he should ask Axel about helping out with his garden. The man's name catches Sora's breath in his throat, but he knows better than to blurt out – to show interest. His father would beat him hard for showing interest in Axel, if Axel was what those kids really said.

So he says it – "Who'd want to work for a faggot?"

It's dangerous territory, being this familiar with his father. The old man looks up from his paper with a smile on his face, and a laugh, and Sora's lips twitch uncomfortably. It's been so long since he's heard his father laugh.

That one word is all it takes. Ten minutes later, Sora knows about the once upon a time, a fairy tale speckled with dirt and tragedy. Axel had once been young and handsome, tall and strong and the head of the lumber mill in Hattiesberg. They hired him to help with construction of the new town hall, and for a year and a half, he lived in the shack he lives in now. He was the one all the neighbours went to with problems, because they knew he'd show up on their stoop with a wry grin and both capable hands ready to wrestle welded pipes and faucets and gears into position – always ready to fix and soothe.

There was another boy named Roxas – but he wasn't capable like Axel. Roxas lived in Sora's house; in Sora's bedroom, and the thought makes his stomach twist.

Roxas was a boy behind the looking glass, some poor, fragile thing with a degenerative disease. His body wasted away with the passing days, his skin pale and translucent like a silk slip. His father said the thing people remembered most about him were his eyes – bright, zaffre eyes, and though Sora didn't hear the words from his father's mouth, he knew they were deep as trenches. His knew that his hair was the colour of ripe honey and swirled upward toward the sunlight – reaching for the colour it mimicked.

Theirs wasn't a typical love story. It was hideous for two men to behave improper like that, especially in those days – eyes sharing sweet, secret glances, hands brushing together across sandscrubbed window sills. Still, every afternoon Axel brought Roxas a piece of welded glass from his work. When he had more free time between odd jobs, the trinkets would take shapes – old fashioned Coca Cola bottles, Mickey Mouse heads, ice cream bars. But most of the time, Axel brought Roxas perfect glass beads, a menagerie of different colours.

When the doc said he had a year at best, Roxas didn't cry.

He didn't, but Axel did.

Axel used those capable hands to build something that would outlast the pretty boy he loved – a garden, filled to the brim with golden flowers and winking sapphire stamens and sturdy stems that would hold up to the Louisiana flash floods. The neighbour kids threw rocks at his back, his shirt ripping and staining red in the sunlight, but he didn't stop. His face echoed with the torment of a soul condemned when he brought Roxas to see his progress – carried the boy on his back under mimosa trees, both seemingly immune to the names being hurled carelessly at their backs.

Until one day, when he went to fetch Roxas – the door was locked. His folks wouldn't let Axel near Roxas, anymore – they thought he was a servant of Satan, sent to tempt their boy into sin. No matter how much he banged on that door, how much he pleaded, how much Roxas screamed at them to unlock the door, because Axel could hear him and that only fueled his hands to beat harder, blood staining the white wood of their front door – the door stayed stalwart, unyielding. This went on for weeks, until Axel resigned himself to his shack, too distraught to even get out of bed and find work.

He hadn't seen Roxas in months when he found a body sprawled out amongst his flowers – a smile on its face and sprigs of Axel's carefully planted hyacinths in both open palms. Roxas had frozen; it was winter, and he was coming to Axel – assumedly – to run away. His body was too weak to reach the front door. He'd been trying to bring Axel flowers, his father spat with disgust. His daddy plowed on though, a grin from ear to ear by now. He said that two fullbacks from the local high school football team had to wrestle Axel from the corpse in the morning, but his screams were heard all the way to the French Quarter and back. When they buried Roxas's body, Axel burned that garden to the ground. The blue of the flowers melted from flickering petals like tears, the smoke sickly sweet like poisoned wine, cloying, enveloping the town.

Axel locked himself inside his house with Roxas's clothes and shoes – took the box of glass and buried it in the ashen remains of his garden. It was like that for weeks – even Roxas's grandma came over to try and console him, but the towering man wouldn't answer the door for nobody, not even someone with the same blue eyes and soft hair of the boy he'd loved. It was the burning inferno, for Axel – the mill up in Hattiesberg fired him when he quit working, and he nearly starved. The only food he got were scraps from the church – out of obligation, to feed the sick – and small feasts from a few neighbours; the ones who'd liked Axel the best.

It wasn't until months later that the flowers were back almost overnight. Axel'd driven his pickup all the way to some horticare nursery up in Tupelo, and replanted rows and rows of imported flowers the colour of his lost love. Even now, almost 40 years later, the man still toiled in the enclosure with the same sort of awkward grace – his fingers as pale now as they ever were. A bit gnarled, but no worse for wear; his hair still patchy in places with the colour of the flames that burned his flowers to ashes.

_Flowers for faggots_, his father says with a laugh, reaching behind him for the counter latch; for his Jim Beam stash. He wrestled with the top, shook his head at the thought of Axel and Roxas like it was an Etch-a-Sketch – like they could be eradicated from his knowledge forever. _Served those fruits right_, he says before he spits again.

Sora tries not to speak, to tell his father to shut up, to scream around an unimaginable sorrow for a story that isn't his.

He doesn't know how to explain why he remembers the smell of those flowers, even though he's never been brave enough to dare approach them. Why he remembers warm soil, warm sun, hands in his hair and soft laughter against his neck.

"_Bet you don't know why the sun sets red_."

* * *

Some people love the whole world, and the whole world loves them back. Some people need love and never get it, spend their existences chasing smiles, glances, because someone _has_ to be the one, right? Some people drown themselves in shots at bars and hope someone will find them beautiful through a haze of intoxication. The world didn't love Axel and Roxas, but it took particular interest in making sure they were shot down just as they crested, in sick predestination.

If Axel never took Roxas's daddy up on that job, he'd still live in Hattiesberg, where he'd lived before, smiling at the women whose houses he fixed with the same lips that wrapped around half-hard dicks in truck stop back lots. If Roxas hadn't been born with eyes quite so blue, he might have married the girl next door and lived a perfect life for a boy of his birth status. Her name was Naminé, Sora learns from the town records he digs up one trip to the library. Her picture is faded, but he can make out pale hair and pale eyes. Marrying her was a step up in the small town hierarchy – the farmer's son and the preacher's daughter. They would've birthed beautiful Aryan children, built a colossal white house with blue shutters; a garden for hyacinths and gentians. If fate were feeling particularly cruel, Axel and Roxas might have met later on in life, when it was too late; when Roxas hired the best carpenter from New Orleans to Birmingham to build him a white picket fence for his big white house, a symbol to ward off impurity.

But Axel was meant to take that job in the same way that Samson was meant to see Delilah bathing in the moonlight. Sora spends days watching Axel in the garden, and words he's never spoken bubble in his throat. Things he _needs_ to say – things that make no sense, coming from a boy Axel's never met. Things that ache, things that burn hot in his throat. Unfinished conversations, words that would never hold meaning any more, because the only person who could speak them and mean them is long buried in a pinebox bed. Sora visits his grave, once, and isn't surprised to see yellow-blue flowers in the holster. He doesn't stay long, because it feels wrong to be here; it's like he's peering through a crack in a hotel wall – interloping into something far beyond himself. He leaves a piece of sea glass on the edge of the grave, far enough to the side that Axel could mistake it as the wind, if he ever found it. The glass is yellow, and pink on its ends, and if Sora traces his fingers along the edges long enough, he thinks he can remember the shape of it in his palm. Rounder, more filled out; curled and grooved like a shell.

He goes to the library next, half-formed intentions taking root in his thoughts. Sora doesn't like to lie, and he's conflicted when he finds that someone else has already ripped Roxas's picture from the town ledger. He's glad he doesn't have to steal something that isn't rightly his, but he's sad Axel got to it first – before Sora could confirm that the boy he dreams about at night, the boy with white clothes and flower crowns and eyes of bruised gentians, is the boy Axel dreamt about, too.

* * *

His father is already passed out on the couch when he heads home that night, and his mother is god knows where. He walks slowly to his room, taking every step carefully – narrowly missing the one that creaks. His steps feel... heavier, somehow. He thinks of the farm boys in movies, slinging sacks of corn on their backs, and his knees begin to buckle under the weight of something he can't explain. His vision whirls.

The bathroom seems the best place to go. Sora's never had vertigo, but he remembers when Kairi caught it the summer they went to Miami. Her cheeks and forehead were lobster red, downy with the same sweat that coated her heaving chest. The slightest dip of her head bid her stomach to rise, bile and sour spit erupting into the trash can over and over.

He feels a pounding in his head like the pounding of his father up the stairs, but he knows his father is dead to the world. He barely makes the bathroom sink before his head splits open, and he grapples with his hair and bites down hard on his tongue. He registers blood dappling the porcelain beneath him, and his eyes rise up to his toothbrush. Stupidly, he considers trying to gently brush his teeth before his head rips open again; he can almost feel invisible fingers prying the skull and scalp and hair apart, stabbing shards of glass into the cerebral tissue beneath. He visualizes colours before his eyes, fireworks like the fourth of July, red flames and blue embers and so much pain he wishes someone would press a barrel to his temple, click off the safety and _pull_.

His eyes raise, and it takes a moment for his vision to stop swimming, for the waves to settle and the foam to bubble out. When it does, he sees what he's wanted to see for months now, and he's not at all surprised. In his mind, he's been waiting for this, for the answer to the riddles, the key that fits the empty spaces. In the mirror, Sora sees soft, blonde hair, eyes exhumed from the ocean floor, skin the colour of sunlight hitting the water at the surface. Roxas smiles, and Sora knows for sure – this is him. He can tell by the bruises on his neck, the dark crescents of his lower eyelids. This is Roxas. This is who Axel loved, the prince in the tower, the boy who froze to death on a pyre of dead flowers. This is Roxas, and he is beautiful.

Sora opens his mouth to speak, and his knees buckle beneath the weight he carried up the stairs. His body slumps, head colliding against the porcelain sink with a clamour, and his hands lose their grip on the sides. Roxas is beautiful. These words are the last that slide through Sora's mind before his head hits the bathroom floor, narrowly missing the lip of the toilet beside him.

He sees polychromatic anemones opening and closing before his eyes. He sees a hand reaching to him from behind his eyelids, a voice calling out softly over the din of ocean breakers, before everything fades to black.

* * *

_It's stifling, the air in this room. Axel takes dinner with the Tilman family for the sake of being polite, but it clumps sweat to the neck of his work shirt something fierce. It's far too hot for July, even in their well-polished kitchen that smells like bleach. He can't dare let himself look at Roxas; if he does, he thinks he might up and run. Their eyes clash like water to hot coals these days, and the steam rises, sweltering over his head until the back of his throat throbs. _

"_Shouldn't be much longer on that porch, I reckon." Roxas's mother is a quiet woman with a way about her that communicates subtle dominance. His father, Axel knows, is content to let her do much of the talking. Her words are soft, well-toned, and a thinly-veiled threat; that they don't want him around any more than is required. She reminds him of the mill bosses up in Hattiesburg. Well-groomed, genteel men, who smile over sweet tea and cornbread; who turn up at home around midnight with palms stained red, and a lynching story sure to hit the presses hot and heavy the next morning. _

"_Axel's taking his time to make it perfect, mama." _

_His hands tremble on his knife, the feeling of the pork he's wedged it in between, too thick to betray the way his hands shake at Roxas defending him. He doesn't look up from the meat, but he can feel the smile on Roxas's face – like the very quirk of the muscles in his jaws shifts the energy of the room. The clack of silverware all around him communicates that they still don't notice the twitch in Axel's jaw, or the nervous bounce to his knees. _

_Roxas continues, smile still thick in his voice. "I keep an eye on his work. We talk sometimes, too. Axel's as passionate about driving nails as you are about driving plows." Axel's peripheral vision watches Roxas raise his glass, sipping inaudibly. The silence is deafening when Roxas isn't speaking, heavy with things everyone wants to say. He can feel Roxas's daddy's hand hovering around his knife, the same way he knows what kind of scandal would swim up if it was to get out that the Tilmans weren't feeding their help; especially when their helper was a white man, as well liked as Axel. _

"_He even weeds your flowers, mama." _

_The woman stiffens almost imperceptibly, but her fork clatters against the wood louder than any machine Axel's heard in his mill. His stomach jumps, the pork in his stomach suddenly roiling, festering. Roxas tells his mama she should thank Axel for going out of his way, and it's before the woman can rip open the worm can that Axel smiles; stands up and scoops his plate into his hands, surprisingly steady. "She's ain't gotta thank me, she oughta whip me for puttin' my filthy hands in those pretty flowers. The way you keep 'em up Mrs. Tilman, they're mighty temptin'."_

_The tension ebbs, and Axel reaches for Roxas's plate – empty, and the blonde makes sure their fingers brush as he reaches for his tea glass. If his mother notices the way Axel's hands nearly drop his plate, she makes no notice; only cuts into her pork with laughter that seems forced. _

"_I'll clean up my plate and then I best be on my way. Before I speed off too fast, though, I might sample a piece of that pecan pie I smell – hope you weren't hidin' it for later, Mrs. Tilman, I got a nose that can sniff out good pie from here to Atlanta..."_

* * *

_Full. All Axel can describe this feeling as is full. He feels so full of something he can't name, something that purrs and throbs and rises like the tides of the New Orleans bay. He feels so full that he might overflow, so full he could break and curl in on himself and cry, but he's not sad. No, with Roxas in his arms, he could never be sad. _

_They kiss in a way that's at once desperate and open, clinging with tongues and teeth and words, but Axel's hands on Roxas's thighs are neither possessive nor bruising. Every brush of fingers to hard, rising flesh is a prayer, a plea that Roxas will never leave him – a plea that Axel will never make out loud. He could never lay ownership to one such as Roxas. The boy is everything; he is the sun, he is the seeds that sprout, he is the soil and water that nurtures them. He is the smell of the mimosa trees that perfume Axel's small room. Axel could never claim those as his own – they deserve to be touched and breathed and tasted by everyone in the world. He wants everyone to hear Roxas's laugh, to watch the way the boy holds himself, the careful way each word is formed behind his lips. He wants everyone to know what it's like to hold him, to be healed by the words he whispers in their ears, to feel as if a piece that's always been missing is filled, at last. _

_But all at once, Axel doesn't want anyone else to see this – to see Roxas splayed before him on the bed, neck red with bite marks he'll claim as the work of mosquitoes when asked, hair the same as before, because Roxas's hair is always unruly like this, always wild and free like the soul it belongs to. Axel's been with so many before him, felt his body join with theirs and his hips arch and his heartbeat thump in time with rhythmic slides – but it's never been like this. He's never felt this feeling like his lungs are filling with water, veins glutted and shot through with sunbaked soil. Axel feels like he's drowning; smothered by overexposure, like he's making love to the surface of the sun._

_Roxas sighs and shudders and comes apart beneath him, and Axel feels his heart break and mend and break again, all at once. _

* * *

"_You start with the spade, and you move the soil like— Are you payin' the least bit of attention, space cadet?" _

_Roxas's eyes are the colour of the stratosphere, and Axel assumes that's approximately the region his brain is orbiting, currently – far above his daddy's rolling fields, or the plot of soil he and Axel have toiled over all morning. He can't really blame a boy like him for dreaming beyond the parameters of small town nowhere; a village on the outskirts of greatness. Axel's lived on the edge for so long, lived on couches and in truck beds and in fields, that he doesn't know what it's like to have a home, anymore. The closest he knows is holding Roxas's hand as the sun sets, and sneaking some of his mama's home-made ice cream; the blue kind she makes that's salty and sweet. _

_There are perks to belonging to somewhere, to someone, just like there are perks to being severed from geography. Axel doesn't know the feeling of being smothered by the people he knows. Axel hasn't experienced first hand the pain of small town small-mindedness. For the most part, Axel doesn't care – it's only lately he finds himself drilling those nails extra hard into Roxas's front porch, and bringing his mama bags of brown sugar for free, under the pretense of "making more of them pies you do so well." It's a desperate, fruitless wish, that he can somehow belong to Roxas and his family, if he does enough tasks well, or gives Roxas's mama enough oil-slick smiles. It's a pipe dream, and one he knows well. As if they could overlook the extra chromosome in his make-up, or the fact that he'll never give them an heir. Or, more pressingly, that he'll drag their boy to hell's front door, or at least, that's what they say. _

_It stings for him to think about where all this is going – in a not very positive direction. There's a warmth that burns between them when their eyes catch one another through an open window. Something that speaks of hope, something that's naïve and stupid, and that makes Axel hate himself for believing he can make anything positive, living under the thumb of a stigma like this. _

_Still, they've got work to do, and Axel's got a job up in Baton Rouge in less time than he's really got to waste on helping some farm boy set up a garden. _

_But time with Roxas is never time wasted, and Roxas is hardly just some farm boy. It burns in the pit of his stomach to think about a life where Roxas is nothing more than some kid he knows. It burns low and harsh, makes a nausea swell in his stomach; burns so much that Axel does something he shouldn't ever do in public, not when he's ten steps from an open window he's sure Roxas's mama is behind, cooking dinner or folding clothes. _

_Roxas jumps beneath Axel's arms when they twine around his waist – too skinny, too thin; his mama needs to pump a few more home-cooked meals into his diet. Still, he laughs into the contact, melting back into Axel's strong grip and pressing closed lips to his whiskered jaw line. "People will say we're in love," he quotes from the movie musical they saw at the drive-in once, and the words make Axel's stomach flutter. _

_He turns Roxas in his arms until their eyes meet. There's a moment of silence where nothing is said but Axel can feel it. He can feel it in his bones, in the sinew binding his muscles together; he can feel it, and he knows Roxas can feel it, too. He can feel the weight of leather on his arms, gear-shaped melee weapons in his grasp. He can remember kissing a boy with eyes so blue they put the Mississippi to shame. He can remember a promise, a fight, a next life... "—in the next life—"_

_Roxas kisses him so hard it splits his bottom lip. His heart — his **heart** — thumps so wildly in his chest he can hardly breathe. He's kissing Roxas hard, kissing him with abandon, with need and the weight of a thousand lives, a thousand kisses just like this one that were waiting for him to begin. _

"_Filthy faggots!" _

_A pain blossoms across Axel's forehead and it takes him a moment to realize that he's been struck by a rock, straight to his temple. Something warm and wet rolls down his cheek, too viscous to be a tear, though the serrated dread that rips its way through his stomach hitches a knot in his throat. Roxas stiffens in his arms, hunches down in a way Axel wishes he could mimic — maybe, if they make themselves small enough, they can simply disappear into the soil beneath their feet; let the Earth swallow them up. _

_More rocks come flying, from school aged children who must have seen them from the road, and Axel pulls Roxas behind him, the boy hiccuping around a sob. Axel wants to do the same, because it's over, now. Whatever there was before, it's over, now. Roxas clings to the back of his shirt as more rocks pelt Axel's stomach, his jawline, his nose, but none of them hurt as much as the loss that rips itself along his stomach. There was no hope for them, now. It was over. _

_Roxas screams when his daddy yanks him back from Axel and smacks him clean across the face. The man moves to hit him again, and Axel reacts, shoving the man harshly into the soil. Roxas is crying now, breathing in big gulps, panicking the way Axel is internally. He wants to tell Roxas to breathe, to calm down, but he sees his daddy reaching into his pocket for the pistol Axel knows he carries around to protect against thieves – he sees Roxas's mama in the window, lips drawn back over her teeth in disgust. _

_Axel runs. He runs straight into Roxas's daddy's cornfields, where he knows the plants are taller than he is. There are no shots fired, nothing to threaten his life, but he can hear the sound of Roxas's father's fists, his mother's screeching, Roxas crying and pleading and shouting anguished pleas, but Axel only stops once, to throw up into the soil beneath him. He runs until he can't see, until he coughs and his hands stain red. He runs far beyond the fields, far into the forest, far, far away. He runs until the pain in his legs is greater than the pain in his head, until his lungs stop drawing breath and his head swims in swirling dark colours. He runs into the darkness until he collapses, and remembers nothing more. _

* * *

_Axel loves Roxas. Axel hates Roxas. Axel hates loving Roxas, almost as much as he hates himself. It's cold now, Roxas's flowers blackened and shriveled. Axel keeps a tumbler filled with gin in one hand, a plate of food three-days-old laying iced over near the window. The days pass quickly into long nights that hang over him painfully heavy; it's easier to drink than to breathe, most days. Winter is harsh and unforgiving, even in a Southern hell like this. It's been snowing hard for days._

_Axel thinks about Roxas every waking second. He hates not being able to hate him, as he should. He should hate Roxas for ruining his life; for making him fall in love and then catching some disease that rots him from the inside out. Roxas is selfish. Roxas will leave him in the end. He hates Roxas. He loves Roxas so much he would stick a knife into his own chest and carve out his heart if Roxas needed it. Roxas is a naïve child. Roxas is the summer. Roxas makes him swallow a tumbler filled with so much gin, he belches around it, stomach heaving harshly, swirling the bile around nearly enough for him to vomit all over the table top. He hates Roxas's parents. He hates doctors and hospitals and white sterile walls. He hates himself and he loves the shotgun he keeps by the front door; loves it because it might grant him an escape. A place where Roxas can't follow. A place where Roxas is already headed. _

_Axel breathes gin and thinks of ticking clocks. Bombs with fuses too short for their ignitors to get away. Axel thinks in hours and days and months. There isn't much time left, he knows. _

_Axel keeps drinking until his vision blackens. Axel drinks for hours, maybe more, until he decides on a whim to go outside for a walk in the snow. It's stifling hot in this room; hot like Dante's inferno, hot like fiery pits, hot like brimstone and lava baths. _

_It's a sick joke, really. Some neighbour kid's left a scarecrow in his flowers. They gave it blonde hair and blue eyes frozen open. They put flowers in its hands. Axel laughs the kind of laugh only achievable when drunk, laughs and thinks about shooting it right between the eyes. Instead, he stumbles over to it, reaches for one of it's skinny arms and draws back as if shot. _

_The arm is hard, like marble – stiff and tinged a cyanotic blue. The arm is bruised and blackened in places, with bone thin appendages and blackened, calloused fingertips. Axel doesn't know how long it takes the synapses to fire before he's thrown up all over the carcasses of his flowers, until he's grabbing Roxas so tight in his arms he loses circulation to his fingers. No. God. Nononononono no non oo no n o. No. Not this. No. Please no. Axel cries out, grips Roxas's hard body tighter to him. There are flowers in his hands. Flowers for a faggot. Axel sobs louder than the wind, doesn't feel the snow beneath his knees, only the body in his arms. He does what he's seen in movies and tries to shut Roxas's eyes, but the eyelids are hard like stone. Blood is frozen in the corner of his eyes; at the lining of his mouth. _

_Axel cries so loud and screams, screams, screams, Axel has died a thousand times, Axel has loved and lost a thousand times, and he could shoot himself now and know that it will never end; that he will always lose Roxas, that there will be no happy endings, only the ache of what can never be and a slew of next lives, next lives, next lives._

"_Let's meet again...in the next life__—"_

_Roxas is dead, and Axel loses his mind. He's drowning again, but this time, he welcomes it. Axel lets the waves wash over his head, and knock him underneath. _

* * *

_He doesn't resurface.  
_

When Sora wakes up, his quilt is tucked up to his chin. His mother is asleep in the chair next to him, but no; she isn't his mother, not really. His head aches from where it knocked against the sink, and there's a nasty knot against his temple.

He's out of the bed before his mind can even register what he's doing. He doesn't pull on shoes, doesn't make a sound when he slips past his father, still drunk in the armchair.

Sora (_Sora_?) doesn't stop running until he's next door. There isn't any noise as the door creaks open – Axel's a handy man to have around, always did keep things well oiled and groomed, Roxas remembers – and he takes a step inside. It smells stale, here. Not like cherries, not like cigars, not like Roxas remembers.

"Axel?" he calls out. There isn't an answer. The hallway before him is long, and he knows what lies at the end. Every step he takes feels heavier than the last; settles in the pit of his stomach and dwells there in chunks of ice. At the end of the hallway is Axel, but Roxas knows now what Sora didn't know before.

It takes him seemingly hours to reach the door in the back. He can hear the cicadas humming louder outside; remember nights like these, making love in Axel's bedroom, with the front door open so the breeze blew in the summertime smell. It's unlocked, like Roxas knew it would be, and when he pushes open the door, the smell is stronger – like someone's left milk sitting out too long. The faintest glimmer of decay; nothing like it would smell in a few more hours of this heat.

Axel is dead. He's on his back in the bed, his hands gnarled the way Roxas's were by the time the disease was at its worst. Roxas chokes on tears, because knowing fate and seeing fate aren't quite the same. His daddy would've beaten him hard for the tears he let fall – for the way he sank to his knees in front of Axel's bed, and took one cold, twisted hand into his own. Sora had noticed his hands, long ago, but in the detached, contextless way a child notices his mama's nose bleeds. The child recognizes the pain, the illness, but not the white packets he finds in her purse when he searches for a butterscotch or a piece of gum. The synapses don't quite fire, the connection isn't made; not until later, when the teenager snorts his first line at a party, and his nostrils drip red.

Roxas smiles at Axel's grizzled hair, the tattoos under both eyes – Roxas wonders what their symbolism is in this life; wonders if he'll have the cognizance to ask him about it in their next.

It's as he's brushing his lover's hair away from his face that Roxas sees it – the envelope, clutched in Axel's other hand. It takes a few minutes of rending skin from paper before he can hold the letter in front of him — it's old, very old. The paper's edges are yellowed, the strip of adhesive half-unstuck. Roxas thinks of Axel running his tongue along the pink strip, the bitterness flowering behind his gums. It takes barely a flick of his finger to open the hatch, and pull from it the vintage sort of notebook paper from his childhood – yellow, with bright blue lines the colour of ice cream.

* * *

_If I don't tell this story, no one will. I'm not good with words, but I owe you this much, at least. Every word I write, every story this tells, is for you, even though you'll never get the chance to read it. Maybe if I get this out on paper, maybe if I spill my intestines, I can start breathing again. Maybe I'll stop smelling you on my way to the kitchen at night. Maybe I'll stop feeling your gaze in the window when I smoke our pipe. Maybe if I put you here, the space you left won't feel so raw and festering. It's selfish of me, to want to forget. We both know I've been selfish from the very beginning, and Roxas Tilman, you deserved better. I'll always hate myself in ways you refused to. _

_I don't know how to put you on this sheet, how to place you on this paper where you don't belong. You don't fit here, in this notebook I'll close and shelve for a rainy day. You deserve to live in our garden, helping me water flowers and pull weeds. This is self-indulgence, this is masochism, this is self-defeat, because I know in my mind this is useless. Putting you on this paper won't make you any less dead, and in the end, that's really what it's all about, isn't it?_

_Loving you was every strawberry I've ever wrapped my lips around – sweet, and sour, with the burn of raw flesh underneath. You were naivety with puncture wounds, innocence dug out with the blunt end of your daddy's spade. You were the red ear in the pile of corn your daddy shucked; you weren't cut straight from Christ's thigh like they were. You were raised by the hair of your head, raised to believe things about yourself I want to wipe from existence. Sometimes, I think about taking my shotgun and putting the barrel in the mouths of the people you called your parents. Sometimes I think about turning the barrel on myself, but then I remember the day we met. _

_I remember your daddy calling me up to fix up his front porch. There was a squeak in the boards that plagued your mama something fierce, made her raise all hell every time he sat out for a smoke. I remember lugging my tools up those stairs, small talking your daddy on his way to the fields. And I remember the weight of your eyes – the first time I saw you, on my knees with a hammer in my hand, sweat on my work shirt. You smiled at me, gave me lemonade that pierced beneath my tongue, deeper than the nails I drove into your front porch. I still see you on the porch of that shanty house, in your white shirt with the frayed ends. You leaned across me to fetch the pitcher, and the fabric breathed your scent like honeyed tea. _

_Your mama and daddy preach our gospel on Sunday mornings. The way they tell it, I was Delilah, and you were Samson. I was temptation and a siren and spat seeds from forbidden fruit. I scrape the eggs and the tomatoes off my siding most mornings, and the shotgun you hate fills the place in my bed that you left. In their church house, they don't talk about what was important, or what should be remembered. They talk about hell and brimstone, lakes of fire and sin. I have to drive all the way to Tupelo to get work, most days. The people in church cringe when somebody slips in a "god damn," but scream "faggot," "rapist," and "queer" on my front steps in red paint. They know the stories of Adam and Eve, Ruth and Boaz, David and Bathsheba, but they don't know too much about Axel and Roxas. _

_They'll never know how I mapped your face in my head, your angles and lines and your cheeks. They'll never know how the soil felt beneath our feet when we planted spring hyacinths, warm and smelling of dust in the sunlight. They don't know how your smile formed crooked when you looked at me. Your lips puckered tight when you thought deep, like there were cherries between your teeth. I remember tracing the tips of my fingers over the skin of your chest, the apex of your thighs damp, musky like smokehouse air. _

_The first of it was blistering, and brunt, and I left you with your legs parted. You were jawing half-phrased pleas for me to stay, Axel. You asked god for me to stay, promised me love if I just didn't _leave_. _

_But I did leave, and then I came back, and then you left, and Christ above I loved you best when you'd go. My chest would burn until the front door slammed open. You'd come in with eyes burning, screaming above me on the couch and your words shot deep inside me, and I cried into your neck like a child. The Earth shifted when we came together. You were love in my bed, life in my arms, sugar and sweat melting like butterscotch on my tongue. Evenings became secret things, kisses and sighs and unspoken apologies. I remember you with your wheat-straw hair, eyes soft like fresh sheets, five feet tall in your Sunday socks. I remember you in words, in carved soap bars, in cigar smoke rings and the smell of honey in your hair. I remember you in the haze before I doze off at night, the film-reel of thoughts I roll through again and again, chasing a sleep that never comes. It's harder to breathe at night, because at night, I knew you best. _

_The fracture — the fracture was quick. It started with a cough and it ended with Memphis doctors and clinics, letters sent down the Mississippi because your folks wouldn't let you leave the hospital. I wrote you clumsy love letters I know your mama burned when she found them. You wrote to me sweet words about music, about meeting Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash at Sun Studio. You wrote about swimming in the river when the doctors let you go. You wrote about your legs catching in riverweed, swallowing gallons of filthy water the colour of bile, getting finned by a catfish the size of your daddy's most prized hog. _

_The disease left you delicate in body alone. Your bones and veins and tendons betrayed you, turned their backs, but your mind whirred with a tenacity to live. You wrote me thoughts of neon lights, places far away from this podunk town, far beyond the lights of the Memphis bars and the wail of the saxophones on Beale Street. You wrote to me about things that were, sweet yellow fruit and blue ice cream bars, sunsets, so many sunsets. You wrote to me about keys and locks, things you dreamed from the fabric of your imagination, but I dreamed them too. So many nights I pressed lips to my headboard, stroking lines down imaginary veins, carving holes into the wood where your goosebumps should be. I want to think that I'd still love you the best even if there hadn't been a before – the past lives I think I understand, now. The lives you wrote me about – they're real, Roxas. I've seen them in my dreams. _

_And I see you. Sometimes, I think you know me better than I know myself. I need to be loved, and you know it well, as you know all my faults. You swallowed me whole, grain of salt and all, balancing me deep inside until your flesh sang raw. You wrote me every day, got your nurse to sneak parcels into the mail stack. You wrote of love and of running away, of time limits and the blood on your hands when you coughed. When there was nothing left they could do, they sent you back here, to live out the rest of your days in the place you grew up. Your parents locked you up tight; sewed you patchwork quilts to keep demons of temptation away. They wouldn't let me in, not when I threatened to break down the door. For two months, I tried every way I could to get to you, but bullets shoot faster than legs can run, and there's no justice for faggots in backwoods Mississippi._

_The end came at night – snow. It was winter. Ice. Frost coating your flowers, the colour of cyanosis. Splotches of blues and reds where no blues and reds should go. You were soft hair and tremulous fingers. You didn't breathe and your tongue felt heavier than rubber. Your eyes were blue like the thing you would never get to borrow, soft like the honeymoon sheets we would never sleep in. You froze dead there in those flowers, and I can't, Roxas. I can't anymore. I can't say that I'm sorry because you won't hear it, you won't know, you won't ever know. You're dead as the doornails people hire me for. You were so beautiful in those flowers – they didn't let me go to your funeral, but I know you were beautiful, dressed in white and black, your Sunday best. _

_I never knew how to love somebody like you. I've written pages before this letter, pages of nothing but the words I couldn't say. I looked at you sprawled on my sheets, I felt your skin crease and your platelets break and the words stuck in the back of my throat. I can't lay any hyacinths on your marble slab, and it's bad taste to lay love letters on closed caskets. But I do, and I would. I'm weak-hearted, but the thing between my ribs still beats on, somehow. I feel it throb when I dig in a shovel, when I tug weeds from your garden. It beats in your memory._

_I never said the words when you had the breath to speak them back, but I love you. I love you, Roxas Tilman. I love you as a man, not as a faggot, not as a sinner or a demon or Delilah. I love you as Axel. I didn't need to see them drop that pinebox in the ground to know I always will. Like the doctors said, the sickness won out – your mama cried, your daddy held his cap in his hand, but your other folks – they bargained. They dressed death up, justified your loss with their Jesus Christ poses. They nailed crucifixes to your casket. They swaddled your memory in patchwork blind faith. They turned their eyes from the cliff you fell from into the things they don't have the perspective to look beyond. If there is a god, you're not where they preach about. You won't walk streets of gold or play a gilded harp in JC's ragtime band. _

_You'll stand in a field of gentian blue. Your breath will smell of persimmons and your palms will be sticky with the sap of citrus plants. You'll breath the perfume of the mimosa trees, pool sweat in the hollows of your elbows and knees. You'll smile with all the ardor and sweetness of our June twilights. Not hell, not brimstone; a child of the sun can never burn. I know now that there will be other chances, times ahead for us where we can get it right. I won't remember you when I meet you again, but I know that I'll love you._

_I love you, Roxas. I've always loved you. I'll remember you in the summertime._

_I love you, and I'm sorry. _

_Let's meet again, in the next life. _

* * *

By the time the police show up, the whole shack is engulfed in flame. Nobody puts in too much of an effort; all the neighbours who once upon a time cared for the man who lived in that shack are long gone. Nobody realizes that the body found in the shack clutching tight to Axel is Sora until the autopsy dental records come back. His father and mother assumed he was with Kairi and Riku, who in turn assumed he was at home.

Not much is known to the public about what happened, or the motive behind Sora setting the old man's house on fire. The bodies were found with Sora on his knees clutching something in his hand – the bones welded together into a fist. The other hand rested on Axel's, which laid across his chest. The boy took up oil canisters Axel kept in his shed, most of them used for fixing up neighbour's cars when the local oil and lube was closed down. There were five canisters in the shed, and Sora spilled them all over the house – up the old stairs, over the bed, down through the quaint little eatery.

In the end, he flicked a Zippo, presumably the old man's, and burnt the whole thing down.

The only thing he didn't burn were the flowers in the plot at the other side of the yard. When the crime scene is declared no longer a crime scene, and Axel and Sora are properly cremated, their ashes are spread along that plot.

No one notices the letter half-buried amongst the hyacinths, yellowed with age and blotchy in places. From oil fingerprints, or rain droplets on the garden, no one can quite be sure.

Or, perhaps, the blotches were tears.

* * *

"_See you, Axel."_

"_See you, partner." _


End file.
